JRuby 1.7.0preview2 and CentOS5 – Time to Boot CentOS5
There are several problems related to the underlying sockets in JRuby that are fixed in 1.7.0, so The Team was interested in moving to it as soon as realistically possible, and today was that day. Everything seemed to be working just fine, but then when we tried to run the code in the CI environment we got all kinds of failures due to the code we were using. While CI was running JDK 1.7, and I think we're all on JDK 1.6 for our laptops, the glibc that exists with CentOS 5 is too old to run the JRuby 1.7.0 code.
I have used CentOS 5 for a long time. It's stable, but it's old. There's a lot to be said for stable, but when it's impossible to deploy things because the fundamental libraries are too old, or the packages are too old to run a recent package from someone else, then it's time to really consider a change.
Here, the solution seems to be to build a custom glibc and then just force the LD_LIBRARY_PATH for the particular application. But that's got all kinds of stability problems in it. Glibc isn't like just another library - it's a fundamental library in the OS. There's tie-ins to the compiler and a lot of other things that aren't as easy to assume will be "OK" with just a new version of glib.
But I've already asked, and it's just not going to be possible to update to a more recent OS. Politics and support make this just right out.
Sad… because those fixes would be really nice.